Taming of football's culture vultures

By Giles Smith

6:45PM GMT 03 Feb 2002

IRREFUTABLE proof that the culture of football has radically changed in the last decade came during the quiz show Britain's Brainiest Footballer (ITV, Wednesday), when a professional player with an English league side failed to solve a question to which the answer was pina colada.

That would have been, surely, an unthinkable outcome as recently as the late 1980s, when any footballer worth his wages would have been able to tell you, not only that pina colada was Spanish for strained pineapple but also where the best ones were served in the region and exactly how many he had had the previous night. Well, perhaps not exactly how many.

But the game has moved on - and there was perhaps no better place to guage exactly how far than last week's extraordinary test of footballing brain power, hosted by the ebullient Carol Vordermann, no slouch herself when it comes to facts and figures and, even more interestingly, a woman who never says "Hello!" when she can say "Oooooh, hello!" instead.

Doubtless even now there will be unkind people sniggering at the idea of footballers competing for the title `Britain's Brainiest', it being the received idea that professional footballers tend not to threaten the hierarchy at MENSA, and that what the average player knows in such traditional quiz categories as History, Politics or Geography of the British Isles could be written on the back of one of Robbie Fowler's nasal strips.

For such people the programme's opening title sequence - a busily evolving computer-generated pattern featuring, among other things, fossils, molecules and footballs, set to ominous, stabbing synthesiser noises and culminating in a giant graphic reading Britain's Brainiest Footballer will almost certainly have smacked more of Monty Python than of a serious endeavour to celebrate the general knowledge of some of our leading contemporary sportsmen in a pressure cooker situation.

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To such cynics, one would only wish to say, firmly, "Stop sniggering at the back." And also, if you're so smart, answer the following: What's the name of the clear and sticky fluid which lubricates articulating joints? My hunch pina colada. Actually, it's synovial fluid, which goes less well with pineapple. And that was merely one of a mind-wracking string of questions on the topic of human biology correctly answered by Clarke Carlisle of Queens Park Rangers on Wednesday night on his way to the title. Clarke kissed the trophy and raised it to the audience, which is not something I recall having seen anyone do on Mastermind.

Germane criticisms could possibly be levelled at the show's claim to be nationally representative. As we met the contestants, one or two anxieties couldn't help but rise about the extent to which the programme appeared to have cast its net. No fewer than a quarter of the 12 footballers who began the game admitted that they played for Colchester United.

However, this coincidence will have been no surprise to scientists studying the national distribution of intelligence, who have long been aware of the phenomenon known as a `brain cluster' centring on the north-east of Essex, and believed to relate to the area's uniquely stimulating microclimate. The presence also on Wednesday of two members of the Rushden & Diamonds side is less easily explained, but could probably be put down to similar causes, were the data available.

Other contestants included Lee Glover of Macclesfield Town, Andy Harris of Leyton Orient and Alan Brazil of Talk Radio. The retired Malcolm Macdonald also took part, leading one to wonder whether he would attempt to pass off other contestants' correct answers as his own, the way he used to do with his team-mates' goals when he was at Arsenal. Sadly, Supermac was dumped in the first round, so we never got to find out.

The inclusion of a World Cup winner (George Cohen from the 1966 side) may not entirely have overcome the disappointment of some viewers at the lack, among the competitors, of what you might call top flight talent. Where were the young and thrusting brains of the Premiership?

It's possible, of course, that they were eliminated in preliminary rounds, if any such thing took place. And if it did, you can bet Sir Alex Ferguson sent along an under-strength team - only Manchester United's very dimmest bulbs - on the pretext of concentrating on the Champions League.

But who needed them? This was the kind of keenly fought contest in which pampered show ponies would have found themselves witheringly exposed. Eleven of the 12 contestants knew the author of Dracula and the number of sides a nonagon has. Nine of them knew that a katydid is a grasshopper. Cohen, who looked set to run away with it at one point, but was socked with a bad run of questions on the arts in the later stages, knew that the model responsible for the 1999 single Oh Yeah was Caprice. And Glover became the first footballer ever to say "Einstein" on national television.

Meanwhile Jim Rodwell, one of the Rushden & Diamonds players, swiftly identified the organisation whose acronym is NATO before casually remarking, "Me and Barry were talking about NATO the other week. Like you do. Training ground banter."

So there it was: 40 years of careful stereotyping exploded by one hour of primetime television. Quite distressing, really. Soon there won't be a single prejudice one can reliably cling to.